Risk & Business Magazine McFarlan Rowlands Fall 2016 | Page 10

LINKEDIN RECRUITER

LinkedIn Recruiter
Getting Your True ROI

S

o, you bought LinkedIn Recruiter
for yourself or your team.
Although it has some amazing
capabilities, the majority of my
clients simply don’t use them.
Here is where most fail.

YOU ARE NOT USING LINKEDIN
PROJECTS THE RIGHT WAY
There are many benefits to the LinkedIn
Projects area. Owners who pay for these
pricey licenses are assured of keeping
this great data whenever an employee
terminates employment for any reason.
Each employee should have a project for
EVERY single job that the employee is
working on. You should also have a project
for every type of position that you intend
to recruit for. You should have a project
for candidates who are great for sourcing
(i.e., they give you a lot of names of other
“A-type” candidates), for candidates who
are great future client prospects, and
for candidates who are already in your
database. It’s easy enough to add anyone
to a project, of course. Once you do, the
person is there FOREVER and won’t
disappear when the employee with the
license loses.
In LinkedIn Recruiter, projects are where
the saved searches are housed. In order
to save a search, you need to assign it a
project. So many users don’t even know

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why it works this way, but that simply
proves my point that they just don’t get the
power of the projects.
YOU ARE NOT USING ALL FIFTY SAVED
SEARCHES AND WHY YOU SHOULD
The free or premium accounts allow
anywhere from zero to five saved searches
to the projects area. LinkedIn Recruiter
allows you to save up to fifty searches. Your
staff is likely not taking advantage of a
fraction of this amount. Don’t believe me?
Go ahead and check. You NEED to use all
fifty saved searches. In fact, you’ll find that
even fifty aren’t enough, so please use all of
them per license. Here’s why:
LinkedIn Recruiter usually allows one
thousand views of search results. That’s
simply too many. You want to narrow
down your focus and get great at sourcing
and using the right keywords. LinkedIn
Recruiter has AMAZING built-in “faceted
filters” that enable you to search things
that the average LinkedIn user simply can’t.
The downside to these filters is that if you
are using them and only them, you are
likely screening OUT many more people
than you are screening in.
For instance, if someone only put in a
last job on his or her profile and you are
looking for someone with ten years of
experience, then your search using the
“years of experience” field will be limited.

In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
THE CANDIDATE must have filled out
these fields first in order for them to
return any results (same for industries, job
title, seniority, size of company, etc.). You
DEFINITELY want to use these “faceted
filters,” but they will be ONE of the many
searches you will use to attack any given
recruitment. This is fixable by creating
a new saved search that may use, for
example, the keyword field.
YOU ARE NOT ATTACKING THE
SYSTEM FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES
As noted, you want to use many of the
existing “faceted filters.” There are also
several ways to search for the same thing.
Ninety percent of users, in my experience,
tend to simply use the keyword field
(without even using Boolean “AND/OR”
nested logic) or the job title fields.
As an example, you can search for a
company under the company free-form
field or also under the company pulldown selections. You actually want to use
BOTH methods and save each of these as
independent searches. Simply understand
the differences between the two. Keyword
searches (whether through the keyword
field itself or via a free-form field like
company name) are simply that. You
will search for whatever you type. If you
select from a pull-down menu (i.e., where